Tampa Right Now / alerts

Get told when something happens

Every tile has an RSS feed that stays empty until the tile has something worth knowing: a street flooding, a bridge in trouble, a big outage, a helicopter parked over a neighborhood. Point any RSS reader at a feed and forget about it.

Everything in one feed: /feeds/all.xml

Watch one grocery item

The Publix feed does more: add ?q= and it lists every deal in this week's ad matching your words, one item each, instead of waiting for the tile to raise an alarm. Commas separate alternatives; within one alternative every word must appear.

Copy one of these straight into a reader. See what it matches checks it against this week's ad right now, so you know whether your words work before you subscribe to silence.

popcorn chicken works because both words have to appear somewhere in the item, so it catches “Sweet & Spicy Popcorn Chicken” and plain “Popcorn Chicken” alike, and ignores Boom Chicka Pop. Adding ready-to-eat to the same phrase narrows it to the hot bar; adding it after a comma widens it to the whole bar instead. That is the one thing worth understanding: a space means and, a comma means or.

Watching something else

The easy way: open the Publix tile, type what you buy into its filter box, and copy the RSS link it prints. It sees the same 179 deals, so you can tell straight away whether your words find anything, and it writes the URL out correctly for you.

To write one by hand, swap the words after ?q=. Two rules:

• No literal spaces. A space makes the URL invalid and some readers reject it outright rather than fixing it for you. Write %20 between words, as above. A + works too; %20 survives more tools. Commas need no escaping.
• Keep it tight. Matching is on plain substrings, so hot also matches “shot”. A bare chicken pulls 13 items, mostly raw supermarket chicken. A watch is capped at 50 items.

Optional: &deal=bogo for buy-one-get-one only, &store=1182 for a Publix other than Water Street.

An item appears once when the deal appears and stays put in your reader for the week, rather than re-appearing on every poll. When Publix posts an ad before it starts, matching deals arrive early tagged [sneak peek].

Power Automate, Zapier and friends

These are plain RSS 2.0, so the standard connectors read them. Two things to set:

• Poll hourly. The Publix answer is rebuilt at most once an hour and the ad itself only changes on Thursdays, so a faster schedule just re-reads the same bytes. Power Automate will not go below 30 minutes anyway.
• Leave the trigger on PublishDate. Power Automate tracks one high-water pubDate and skips anything not strictly newer, so every deal here gets its own timestamp inside the hour the ad starts. The UpdatedOn setting will not work: these items carry no updated tag.

Every tile

No email, no accounts, no push permission grabs. If you have never used RSS: Feedly and Inoreader work in a browser, NetNewsWire is free on iPhone and Mac, Feeder is free on Android. Paste a link above into any of them. Most read feeds without an account.

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